Saturday, June 21, 2014

Even before Mick Pork pointed me in the direction of David Herdson's piece in Political Betting (aka Stormfront Lite) today, I was toying with the idea of offering my thoughts on this subject, because it isn't just southern Tories like Herdson who take the view that a decent run for England at the World Cup would have have been good for the Yes campaign. The theory goes like this - the London media drive us crazy for the next few weeks by talking at their UK-wide audience as if we are all English, and we eventually become so offended that Don't Knows and soft Nos start asserting their own national identity in a political sense. But my guess is that it's largely people who have football fanatics as friends and family who imagine that would have happened. Indeed, it may well have happened within that section of the population, but that is far from being the whole of Scotland. By contrast, casual viewers of the World Cup could easily have ended up being swept along with the Eng-er-land fixation of the media and found themselves practically thinking they are English (brainwashing often works, remember). And then of course there is the large section of the population who wouldn't have given a monkey's one way or the other. So I personally think that the net effect of a good England run would have been neutral at best, and possibly mildly harmful for Yes at worst.

Frankly, I'm relieved to see England go out, because it means that our status as neutrals will henceforth be reflected in the television coverage we watch. Although now that all four "Home Nations" are in exactly the same position as countries who have been knocked out of the World Cup, it'll be interesting to see whether that is fully reflected in the coverage, or whether England's future prospects will still be considered worthy of discussion in a way that the prospects of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are not. (OK, I think we already know the answer to that!)

Herdson goes on to indulge in this piece of fantastical thinking about how the Commonwealth Games might not be good for the Yes campaign either -

"There are of course other opportunities over the summer for Scottish patriotism to fuse with nationalism in a rather more positive way (i.e. rather than being simply anti-English), the Commonwealth Games being the most obvious. A successful Games, however, could be used by both sides: either to assert Scotland’s ability to deliver top level events on its own or, alternatively, to show that independence is unnecessary to it being able to do so."

Jesus. Anyone who has been following the funding arrangements for the Commonwealth Games cannot help but conclude that this is something that Scotland has managed to do in spite of being part of the United Kingdom, in contrast to the Olympics, which London managed to do because of money drawn from every part of the UK, including Scotland.

However, I do agree that it remains to be seen what the effect of the Commonwealth Games will be. It will distract attention from the referendum campaign at a crucial moment. The BBC will present the event from a wholly British perspective, with no Scottish opt-outs, and with viewers invited to think of the distinction between the four "Home Nations" teams as being a mere formality. I still think the benefits will outweigh those factors, but at this stage it would be foolish to imagine we can be 100% confident of that.

Thursday, June 19, 2014

From the little I've seen of Welsh First Minister Carwyn Jones on TV over the years (and the fact I've seen so little speaks volumes about the extent to which the broadcasters buy into the guff about the UK being a "partnership of nations") he's always seemed like a relatively impressive figure. But his occasional contributions to the Scottish independence debate are making it increasingly obvious that he's actually a bit of a fantasist. First of all, we had his bizarre claim that Wales would somehow "veto" an independent Scotland's entry into a currency union, in spite of the fact that a devolved territory within the UK cannot possibly have any say over such matters. And now he's surpassed himself with the suggestion that the real "danger" of independence is that it might prompt England to "leave the union", with Wales and Northern Ireland ending up stranded -

"But it also means that I can see a scenario where in two or three years time there are calls in England to get out of the union with these expensive Celts in the west and over the Irish Sea.

If Scotland can leave the UK, so can England.

That leaves us and Northern Ireland."

Yeah, because of course the Westminster elite are famous for not wanting to rule as much territory as humanly possible. I do rather like that idea, though, because if the anti-independence propagandists are right, it would by definition mean that the remaining Welsh-Northern Irish union would be the sole legal successor state to the UK, and would be able to decide whether England should be "allowed" to continue using the pound. It would also take over from London as one of the world's five permitted nuclear weapons powers under international treaty arrangements, and would automatically become one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. England, by contrast, would naturally be thrown out of the EU and forced to join the euro (presumably on the same day).

Sounds far-fetched? "IT'S THE LAW!" screams Adam Tomkins (before demanding a written apology for your impertinence in thinking yourself worthy of sharing a planet with him).

Hot on the heels of the No campaign making boastful claims about the new YouGov poll that are utterly irreconcilable with other claims they made only a few weeks ago on a glossy Twitter graphic, they've now excelled themselves with yet another glossy Twitter graphic - this time on the theme of national unity (yes, really!) and featuring the SNP logo in place of the 'o' in 'No Thanks'. (But full marks to them for resisting the temptation to "unite the nation" by once again portraying the logo as a hangman's noose.) The text reads as follows -

"NO THANKS1 in 4 SNP supporters are voting No for more powers within the United KingdomSource : YouGov poll of Scottish voters for the Sun newspaper, June 2014"

Hmmm. Firstly, what do they actually mean by the word 'supporters'? I'd suggest that most reasonable people would interpret it as meaning respondents who would vote SNP in an election now, and if taken that way the claim is an out-and-out falsehood. In fact, the YouGov poll cited as a source shows that only 9% of current SNP supporters are planning to vote No, which compares rather favourably to the 17% of current Labour supporters who are planning to vote Yes.

But presumably what they really mean by the "1 in 4" claim is 1 in 4 of the people who voted for the SNP in the unprecedented landslide victory of 2011, regardless of whether those voters are now supporters of other parties. On that measure, it's true that the YouGov poll shows that 24% of 2011 SNP voters are in the No column, but the poll also shows that 21% of 2011 Labour voters are in the Yes column. You'll probably already have spotted that those two numbers are remarkably similar, which is a touch startling given that in 2011 Labour were down to their rump, core, "come hell or high water" vote. But I'm sure the No-bots would have mentioned all of that in the graphic if there had been space - after all, it's their mission in life to give people "the facts you need for the big decision", without fear or favour.

Having said that, it's on the word 'fact' that the graphic becomes somewhat unstuck. You see, in order to justify their use of the YouGov poll as a "source" for their claim, it's not sufficient to be able to demonstrate that the poll shows that 1 in 4 SNP "supporters" (ambiguously defined) are planning to vote No. It's also necessary to demonstrate that the poll shows that all of those people are voting No specifically because they want "more powers within the United Kingdom", and are credulous enough to think that a No vote will result in those powers being delivered. Unfortunately, it's literally impossible to demonstrate that, because there isn't the slightest suggestion in the YouGov datasets of people having been asked whether they want new powers, whether they believe new powers would be delivered after a No, or whether they're voting No in spite of being fully resigned to the status quo being maintained, or indeed to powers being removed from the Scottish Parliament.

But leaving aside those minor quibbles, let's pay homage once again to the No-bots and their inspiring commitment to "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me Gideon".

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Blair McDougall and his Abominable No-Men will be thanking their lucky stars today that YouGov are one of only two BPC pollsters that do not apply any turnout filter or weighting to their headline results. That's the one and only reason why YouGov have not just become the fourth pollster in a row to report an increase in support for Yes. Here is the result of today's poll when only respondents who are certain to vote are taken into account (that's the filter Ipsos-Mori use for their headline numbers) -

In case you're wondering, the logic for applying what may look like quite extreme filters is that people generally overestimate their own likelihood to vote. Ipsos-Mori only include people who say they are certain to vote in their headline numbers because there has been such a strong correlation in the past between the numerical strength of that group and actual turnouts in elections. No fewer than 82% of the sample in today's YouGov poll say they are absolutely certain to vote, so unless you think the turnout in September is going to be ridiculously high, the voting intentions of those people may well be a better guide to the state of play than the reported headline numbers.

As pointed out by Scottish Skier on the earlier thread, there are a couple of oddities about this poll. The first is that Labour have a small lead in Holyrood voting intentions - that's in contrast to an SNP lead in the last YouGov poll, an SNP lead in actual votes cast in the European elections, and a very handsome SNP lead reported in the first post-Euro poll to be conducted by No-friendly firm Ipsos-Mori. So that might make us wonder if YouGov have ended up with a particularly "Nat-light" sample in this poll, in which case the referendum figures might also be slightly suspect.

But the most peculiar thing of all is the result of the supplementary question about the J K Rowling non-story, and how it will affect people's voting intentions. What normally happens with this sort of question is that the respondents who claim that they are more likely to vote Yes or No as a result of Event X or Y are for the most part people who were planning to vote in that way anyway. So given that slightly more people said that the Rowling garbage would make them more likely to vote No than said it would make them more likely to vote Yes, we should find an implied No lead that is either the same or greater than in the headline numbers. Instead, we find the polar opposite -

Does the abuse directed at J K Rowling make you more likely to vote YES in the referendum, more likely to vote NO, or does it make no difference?More likely to vote Yes : 6%No difference, I would have voted Yes anyway : 35%TOTAL YES : 41%More likely to vote No : 12%No difference, I would have voted No anyway : 39%TOTAL NO : 51%
With Don't Knows excluded, it works out as...Yes 45%No 55%

I'm struggling to interpret those numbers in any other way than as meaning that there are considerably more people in the YouGov sample thinking about voting Yes than are willing to say so when asked a more direct question.

There's one other reason for being a touch cautious about the headline numbers in this poll, and it's effectively the Survation problem in reverse. In many previous YouGov polls, 18-24 year olds (they STILL aren't bothering to interview 16 and 17 year olds!) have been the most Yes-friendly age group - for example, in the last poll Yes were only 1% behind in that group. But in this poll, young voters have swung in the other direction to such a wildly implausible extent that they're now the most No-friendly age group. The impact of that swing (which in reality is likely to be an illusion caused by random sampling variation) has been magnified because the 74 real respondents in the group have been upweighted to count as 123 'virtual' respondents. That isn't quite as extreme as the upweighting Survation had to do, but it's still plenty enough to have had a potentially distorting effect.

"We are called upon at the beginning of the 20th century to decide the question propounded in the Sermon on the Mount, as to whether we will worship God or Mammon. The present day is a Mammon worshipping age. Socialism proposes to dethrone the brute god Mammon and to lift humanity into its place."

Keir Hardie, one of the founders of the Labour party, and a man who Blair McDougall cites as his hero. Now just look into your heart for a moment, Blair - do you honestly believe that the neoliberal UK of today is closer to Hardie's ideal than an independent Scotland would be? Truly?

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

The results of tonight's YouGov referendum poll have just been released, and they show the firm consolidating its status as one of this campaign's extreme No-friendly outliers -

Should Scotland be an independent country?

Yes 36% (-1)No 53% (+2)

Now, the percentage changes I've listed above are accurate, and are from the most recent YouGov poll in April. It's worth making the point, though, that the No campaign have for several weeks been insisting that there was a more recent YouGov poll than that - the one conducted by Progressive Partnership. That's a load of garbage (Progressive are an entirely different pollster with their own weighting procedures), but they've been doing it so they could claim that YouGov were showing a six-point increase in the No lead (in fact both YouGov and Progressive had shown a decrease in the No lead). So according to the No campaign's own logic, the changes in tonight's poll must actually be reported as follows -

Yes 36% (+4)No 53% (+1)

In the interests of consistency, we can doubtless look forward to a "Momentum for Yes" graphic appearing on Blair McDougall's Twitter feed any second now. What's that? Don't be cynical - of course they're not going to do another "Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia" pivot, and suddenly decide that the Progressive poll was not a YouGov poll after all. These guys have integrity.

This is also an appropriate moment to repost an observation I made about Kevin Schofield of the Sun (who commissioned the poll) before the results were published -

I was also amused to spot Kevin Schofield almost biting someone's head off for accurately pointing out that the last YouGov poll for the Sun showed a 60-40 lead for No. It's actually normal practice for a newspaper to make the comparison with the previous poll commissioned by themselves, even if the same polling company has conducted a poll for another client more recently. So clearly Schofield is determined to make the comparison with the poll that gives the highest baseline figure for Yes, in order to push the "momentum for No" spin. He's nothing if not transparent.

So how does tonight's result rank for Yes when compared to previous polls from this most No-friendly of firms? Pretty well, actually - it's the third lowest No lead reported by YouGov during the campaign so far, only being beaten by the previous two polls which showed leads of 15 and 14 points respectively. Those numbers are well within the standard margin of error when compared to tonight's poll, so it's perfectly conceivable that nothing has changed, or even that Yes has made further progress. In normal circumstances you'd say the latter possibility is far less likely, but the situation is considerably less clear-cut when you've just had record-breaking highs for Yes reported by both Panelbase and Survation. As recently as the 1st of March, a YouGov poll was published showing a No lead of 18 points - 1 point higher than tonight, and yet at the time that was as good as it had ever been for Yes. It must also never be forgotten that YouGov were showing a No lead of 30 points as recently as last August, meaning that it's still true to say that the gap has essentially halved since then. So we have a pattern that is at least consistent with the possibility of Yes being at an all-time high across all the pollsters (with the trend being masked in this particular YouGov poll by random sampling variation), but obviously we'll have to wait for further evidence to see if that is actually the case.

We've now had four polls from different firms over recent days (I'm excluding TNS-BMRB because the fieldwork for that was much, much earlier), and three of them have shown decreases in the No lead, with only one showing an increase. And it's not only the case that YouGov are contradicting a general trend - the extent of the increase they're suggesting in the No lead is less than the decreases reported by ICM, Panelbase and Survation. The chances that there have been any real world gains for No of late therefore seem vanishingly small - unless of course they happened only over the last few days as a direct result of the absurd reporting of the Lally/Rowling non-stories. I think that's unlikely, but even if it is the case my guess is that it will prove to be a pyrrhic victory for the Abominable No-Men. Our lazy journalists may have fallen hook, line and sinker for the 'Cybernat' nonsense, but they'll get bored with it quickly enough, and any temporary benefit the No camp have cynically squeezed out of the whole thing will melt away.

In another sense, You Gov isn't the outright odd-one-out of the four recent polls. YouGov and ICM may be contradicting each other by showing very different directions of travel, but the common factor with both polls is that they can be seen as reversions to the mean after an unusual finding in the previous poll. By contrast Panelbase and Survation are both showing tiny No leads that are well below those firm's normal ranges. So if we set aside the possibility of a very recent swing to No caused by the Rowling/Lally garbage, that essentially leaves us with two roughly equal possibilities - a) the position has been relatively steady recently, or b) Yes have surged to their highest ever level of support. At least one or two more polls will be required to resolve the uncertainty.

We heard a couple of days ago from someone who took part in the YouGov poll (or at least I assume it was this poll). He mentioned that he was asked for his country of birth. I'll be watching like a hawk to see if those figures are published, because on the one previous occasion that YouGov released that sort of data, it turned out they had far too many English-born people in their sample, and far too few Scottish-born people. If that's a consistent problem for the firm, it could cast doubt on the size of the No leads that they typically report. We saw with the weekend's ICM poll that reweighting to the correct country of birth target figures from the census was sufficient to reduce the No lead by 2.4%.

As soon as I saw Kevin Schofield mention that a YouGov poll was on its way, I had an inkling that it wasn't going to show further movement towards Yes, because I had only just read an astonishingly conceited article on the YouGov website that effectively said : "We're completely ignoring the fact that other major pollsters are showing a virtually tied race. Only our own polls matter, and because we're showing a wider gap, Alex Salmond will be desperate for a game-changer." Back in the real world, there is far more than just one possible scenario for a Yes victory. The first scenario is that Panelbase are the most accurate firm, in which case it doesn't matter if every other pollster continues to show a No lead between now and polling day, and it doesn't matter if the Yes vote in the Poll of Polls never gets any higher than 45% or 46% - all we need is a tiny further swing, and we'll be there. In some ways that would be the most satisfying way of all to win, because it would absolutely stun the London establishment - but they'd have no-one else but themselves to blame for failing to take the Panelbase results seriously enough. A second scenario is that ICM and Survation are closest to the truth, in which case a more middling swing is required - although even then it's still possible that Yes could win after never quite taking the lead in the Poll of Polls. And the third scenario is that the No-friendly pollsters are right, in which case Yes will need a heftier swing and an outright lead in the Poll of Polls - but that won't necessarily require a "game-changer". The SNP pulled off exactly that kind of swing over a short period of time in 2011 without any specific game-changing moment (unless you count Iain Gray taking cover in a sandwich shop).

* * *

I've been having a look at the datasets from the ComRes regional poll for the Borders and Dumfries & Galloway. The exact swing to Yes since the previous poll in January is 1.2% (although over on Planet McDougall that somehow constitutes "momentum for No").

English-born respondents make up a whopping 24% of the ComRes sample - I've no idea if that means they've been over-represented, but it certainly goes a long way towards explaining the size of the No lead in the poll. (For comparison, the 2011 census showed that just 9.6% of the Scottish population are English-born.) Among Scottish-born respondents in the Borders and D&G, the Yes vote is a full five points higher than among the full sample.

I must say that I think ITV Border are being a bit thick in the way they're approaching these polls. If they can afford telephone polls of 1000 people in the Borders and D&G, then by definition they can afford Scotland-wide telephone polls of 1000 people. That would tell us far more, and it would also attract much more interest in ITV Border programmes that release details of the polls (ie. Lookaround and Representing Border). But as things stand, it's only STV that are bothering to commission national telephone polls - or at least ones that are intended for public consumption.

* * *SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS

The mild disappointment of the YouGov poll hasn't had a huge impact on the trend shown by the Poll of Polls - the last update showed the lowest No lead ever, while tonight's update merely shows the second-lowest No lead ever.

(The Poll of Polls is based on a rolling average of the most recent poll from each of the pollsters that have been active in the referendum campaign since September 2013, and that adhere to British Polling Council rules. At present, there are six - YouGov, TNS-BMRB, Survation, Panelbase, Ipsos-Mori and ICM. Whenever a new poll is published, it replaces the last poll from the same company in the sample. Changes in the Poll of Polls are generally glacial in nature due to the fact that only a small portion of the sample is updated each time.) The median is now being calculated as the mid-point between ICM and TNS-BMRB. Having moved into a more middling ranking with their last couple of polls, YouGov have now reverted to their customary place at the extreme No-friendly end of the spectrum.

The political editor of ITV Border has just tweeted the results of a "south of Scotland" poll. It's important to stress that this does not refer to the South of Scotland electoral region, but only to the much smaller area covered by ITV Border - ie. the Borders and Dumfries & Galloway, which between them cover just 5% of the Scottish population, and can reasonably be assumed to be the most anti-independence part of the country.

The rounded headline figures with Don't Knows excluded are Yes 30%, No 70%, which represents a small swing in favour of independence since the January poll when (on the unrounded numbers) Yes were on 28.7% and No were on 71.3%. That does of course assume that the methodology was sufficiently similar this time around to make the two polls comparable - the January poll was conducted by ComRes, using telephone fieldwork.

Is there any way of extrapolating these numbers to get a sense of the national picture? I know that might seem a bit of a redundant exercise given that we've just had several nationwide polls showing significant progress for Yes, but if this does turn out to be a ComRes telephone poll it's of special interest because we've had no ComRes national polls at all, and very few national telephone polls from any firm. The only possible extrapolation method I can think of is to look at the regional differences exhibited in the 1997 devolution referendum, when the Yes vote in the Borders and Dumfries & Galloway was 12.7% lower than the national Yes vote. On the second question about tax-varying powers, the Yes vote was 14% lower than nationally. So if as a Peter Snow-esque "just a bit of fun" exercise we assume that the differential will be exactly the same this time (unlikely), that means this poll would imply a national Yes vote of about 43% or 44% - somewhat higher than suggested by Ipsos-Mori in the most recent nationwide telephone poll.

* * *

UPDATE : Judging from the latest post by "Better Together"/"Non Merci", this was indeed another ComRes poll. Curiously, the headline chosen by the No campaign is "Momentum is with the campaign for Scotland to stay in the UK" - which is a rather creative interpretation of a poll that shows a 1% increase in the Yes vote and a 1% decrease in the No vote. Oh, how I'm going to miss my daily fix of McDougall Logic when this is all over...

* * *

UPDATE II : There's a new (nationwide) YouGov referendum coming out overnight. This will be the first poll to properly factor in any fallout from the Lally/Rowling nonsense. As always, Twitter Kremlinology might offer the earliest clues as to what the poll shows. I'm afraid Nat-Basher Extraordinaire Kevin Schofield was the first to mention it (although to be fair that may just be because it's in his paper!).

* * *

UPDATE III : Judging from the retweets of Schofield's comment by assorted thuggish anti-independence campaign staffers, it's clear that they think they can spin this one in their favour. It's worth bearing in mind, though, that the last YouGov poll in April showed the No lead at an all-time low for the firm of 14 points, so any increase tonight has to be seen in that light. YouGov have consistently been one of the most No-friendly pollsters, and will seemingly be consolidating that status.

More amusingly, it's also worth bearing in mind that the No campaign have until now falsely claimed that the last YouGov poll was in the fact the poll conducted by Progressive Partnership showing a No lead of 20 points - they've been doing that so they could lie through their teeth and pretend that YouGov had shown a six point increase in the lead (in fact both the YouGov and Progressive polls showed a decrease in the No lead). So if tonight's lead falls anywhere between 15 and 19 points, we can sit back and enjoy the spectacle of the No camp doing yet another "Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia" pivot, and suddenly discovering that the last comparable YouGov poll was the one showing a 14-point lead, thus allowing them to say that the No lead has increased in this one as well. On Planet McDougall, EVERY poll shows "momentum for No" - it's the law!

I was also amused to spot Kevin Schofield almost biting someone's head off for accurately pointing out that the last YouGov poll for the Sun showed a 60-40 lead for No. It's actually normal practice for a newspaper to make the comparison with the previous poll commissioned by themselves, even if the same polling company has conducted a poll for another client more recently. So clearly Schofield is determined to make the comparison with the poll that gives the highest baseline figure for Yes, in order to push the "momentum for No" spin. He's nothing if not transparent.

I didn't see it, but Mick Pork has mentioned on the previous thread that Andrew Neil has been abusing his position as a BBC host to crow about a poll that purports to show that Scots want Trident to stay here. As Neil always takes such sadistic pleasure in taking apart interviewees who don't have a proper understanding of the numbers (and somehow got away with it in a recent interview with Douglas Alexander even though he'd made a catastrophic schoolboy slip-up in his own sums), I wouldn't mind seeing someone do the same to him in respect of this poll. This is what he appears not to have taken account of -

1) It actually shows that the Scottish public do not want Britain to have nuclear weapons at all, by a margin of 46% to 37%. (That makes it uncannily similar to an Ashcroft poll which was also brazenly misreported as showing that Scots were pro-Trident.) It's impossible to argue that the public want Trident to stay when they do not think it should even exist.

2) The question that has generated such excitement among the nuclear weapon loving Brit Nats (Johann Lamont must be so proud) implicitly presupposes that Westminster will be retaining the inhuman weapons against our wishes, and merely poses a practical query about what should happen to them after independence.

3) This is not a full-scale Scottish poll at all, but a small subsample of a Britain-wide poll. It's therefore of limited validity. Even if it had been a full-scale poll, the tiny 4% lead for keeping Trident on the Clyde after independence would have been within the standard margin of error. As it is, the margin of error for a small subsample is incalculable, and it's therefore entirely conceivable that the same question posed to a full-scale, properly weighted Scottish sample would produce the opposite result.

Incidentally, the Herald's reporting of it as a "new poll" is also somewhat misleading - it may have only just been released, but the fieldwork for it concluded last October!

Monday, June 16, 2014

The datasets for yesterday's ICM poll are now up, and just like last month they make for fascinating reading. Most importantly, they show that undecided voters are breaking heavily for Yes -

Which way do you think you are most likely to vote, "Yes" or "No"? (Asked to undecided voters only)Yes 27%No 10%

That's a really striking finding, and it's considerably more important than it would have been in earlier ICM polls, because the firm introduced a huge methodological change two months ago that significantly increased the reported number of undecided voters. It's crucial to stress that this can't be taken as proof that undecided voters in general are breaking for Yes - different polls are showing conflicting evidence on that front, and the sample sizes are too small to draw firm conclusions anyway. But a better way of looking at it is that undecided voters who say Yes when pressed are on exactly the same spectrum as the people who say Yes on the original question - it's just a different level of certainty. For some reason Yes leaners were more likely than No leaners to say they were undecided on the original question in this particular poll, and that may just be a freakish occurrence that has helped to suppress the Yes vote on the headline numbers. When 'undecided leaners' are added into the main results (with the hard-core of true undecideds excluded), it's sufficient to increase the Yes vote by 1.2%, and of course to decrease the No vote by the same amount.

That's after turnout weighting is applied - yet another extremely recent ICM methodological innovation. Without turnout weighting the Yes vote is 0.2% higher - not a huge difference, but enough to tip the balance on the rounded numbers and make it Yes 47%, No 53%. In the interests of fairness, though, I should point out that turnout weighting is probably a very good idea, and has actually helped the Yes vote slightly on the reported headline numbers (and that was also the case last month).

But the biggest methodological change of all is undoubtedly acting to suppress the reported Yes vote. Starting with the Easter poll, ICM have been massively upweighting respondents who report that they didn't vote in the 2011 Holyrood election. In the case of this poll, 188 real respondents have been upweighted to count as 313 'virtual' respondents. Although that portion of the sample isn't ridiculously No-friendly by any means, it does have a somewhat bigger No lead than the rest of the sample, so the effect of the upweighting is obviously to give No a small boost.

Respondents who recall voting for any of the four major parties in 2011 are naturally weighted down to make way for the non-voters, and it's interesting to note that SNP voters are weighted down by almost exactly the same amount as Labour voters. Not much succour there for the theory that weighting by 2011 vote recall is leading to an artificially "Nat-heavy" sample, and thus increasing the reported Yes vote.

When the poll was published, I pointed out that it would be well worth checking whether ICM had once again under-represented male respondents and over-represented English-born respondents - both errors that have the inevitable effect of suppressing the reported Yes vote. The answer turns out to be "yes", and incredibly the degree of error is almost identical to last month. Just 45.2% of the sample are male, even though the 2011 census showed that 47.9% of the over-16 population are male. And 14.6% of the sample were born in England, even though the census showed that only 9.6% of the over-16 population were born there.

I've reweighted the numbers for the whole sample to the correct target figures for country of birth, and it increases the Yes vote from 45.1% to 46.3% (and of course decreases the No vote from 54.9% to 53.7%). Those figures take no account of undecided leaners or indeed of turnout weighting, but presumably the margin of increase would be in the same ball-park on each measure - so Yes might well be above 47% when undecided leaners are added in. (In fact there's probably enough information in the datasets to attempt that calculation, so if anyone has got three hours to spare...!)

The under-representation of men has a much more marginal effect, but as we saw last month that can sometimes still be enough to tip the balance on the rounded numbers used for publication.

As I've said before, the error on the country of birth is probably caused by 'institutional inertia'. I would imagine ICM are only asking where people were born to judge the extent to which English-born and Scottish-born respondents are diverging, and it hasn't seriously occurred to them to weight by those findings because it's not something they do as a matter of routine. But the gender error is much more baffling, because it must be something that ICM are doing deliberately. Why would they think that there are 10% more women than men in the adult population? Perhaps they reckon there's been a disproportionate influx of female immigrants to Scotland since the census was conducted? And even if that is their reasoning (doubtful), why do they claim to weight by target figures derived from the census? It just doesn't make any sense.

Sunday, June 15, 2014

Panelbase have got into the rather refreshing habit of releasing the datasets for their Sunday polls on the Sunday itself. With ICM it's not unusual to have to wait several days (although to be fair they were a bit quicker last time). First things first - here are what the Panelbase numbers look like if you only round them to one decimal place...

Should Scotland be an independent country?Yes 48.3% (+2.1)No 51.7% (-2.1)
Unless we count the Panelbase poll from last summer that used an unusual question sequence, that's the narrowest No lead shown by any pollster in the campaign so far. It even beats the famous Easter Sunday poll from ICM, which had Yes at 48.0% and No at 52.0%. It's also better for Yes than this week's Survation poll by a slightly wider margin than the rounded numbers would make you think - Survation had Yes at 46.6% and No at 53.4%.

And unlike Survation, there's nothing that leaps out at me in the Panelbase datasets that would raise any question marks over the swing to Yes - there hasn't been any radical upweighting of a particularly Yes-friendly group. As is the case in most polls, the No lead is slightly wider on the unweighted numbers, but that mainly happens because pollsters start with too many older and "ABC1" respondents, who have to be scaled back. In this case there were also slightly too many women. But there was no upweighting of respondents who recalled voting SNP in 2011, whereas Labour voters were actually upweighted quite significantly.

Evidence for the remarkable strength of the Yes campaign among men continues to build - in this poll Yes lead by 55.8% to 44.2% with male respondents, after undecideds are excluded. I understand the importance that is attached to closing the gender gap, but given the significance of social proof, I do wonder if there might still be scope for a substantial further swing to Yes among men. It certainly seems that in some male-dominated social circles (especially working-class ones) undecided voters are now more likely to encounter Yes voices than No voices, which must surely have an effect. In other words, I don't find it totally implausible that Yes might win with a gender gap that stays the same or widens further.

One interesting detail, which may just be coincidence, is that there were exactly the same number of respondents - 397 - who said 'Yes' to the referendum question, and who said they "very likely" to vote for independence if they thought there would be another Tory or Tory-led government after next year's UK general election. An additional 61 respondents said they were "quite likely" to vote for independence in those circumstances. So it almost looks as if the 397 respondents are the 'baseload' figure for Yes, with there being an additional potential source of support among anti-Tory voters who currently say they are undecided or voting No. Admittedly, though, some of the 397 drift away (albeit probably only to "quite likely to vote for independence") if they assume that Labour will win the general election.

The second referendum poll of this evening is now out, from the firm that is often regarded as the UK's "gold standard" polling organisation. It shows the No lead almost halving from 12% to 7% -

Should Scotland be an independent country?

Yes 36% (+2)

No 43% (-3)

With Don't Knows excluded, it works out as -

Yes 45% (+3)

No 55% (-3) When the datasets are released, the first thing I'll be looking out for is whether Yes were unlucky not to be rounded up to 46%, which of course would also have meant No being rounded down to 54%. A rough calculation suggests that may well have been case. If so, it would be a repeat of the March ICM poll, when Yes missed out on being rounded up to 46% by the tiniest fraction imaginable.

So we've had three polls since Wednesday evening, and every single one has shown Yes closing the gap by a significant degree. It must be conceded now that, by any rational measure, the chances of Scotland becoming an independent country have increased markedly of late. However, it's true that there is a difference between Panelbase and Survation on the one hand, who are both showing the No lead at its lowest point ever, and ICM on the other hand who are showing a result that is within their previous normal range, even though the No lead has slumped since the most recent poll. I'm sure John Curtice will be seizing upon that fact to make the case that we do not yet have absolutely conclusive proof that there has been a renewed momentum towards Yes in recent weeks. But the problem with that argument is that ICM keep changing their methodology, and it's therefore a touch meaningless to talk about a normal range - if they had been using their current methodology all along, it's absolutely impossible to know what they would have been showing in February or March. All we can really say for sure is that they're back to showing an extremely close race, and in that sense they're providing corroboration for Panelbase and Survation.

We can also officially welcome ICM back into the fold of relatively Yes-friendly pollsters. As Calum Findlay pointed out a month ago, in their last poll ICM somehow went at a stroke from being the most Yes-friendly pollster of the lot to being one of the most No-friendly. Indeed, if they hadn't introduced turnout weighting in that poll, they would have showed a Yes vote of just 40% after rounding - exactly the same as Ipsos-Mori reported a couple of weeks ago. That poll just smelt all wrong from start to finish, and although it's possible that it showed an inflated No lead due to an extreme case of margin of error noise, my gut feeling is that it had more to do with the utter folly of experimenting with an introductory question that would have affected respondents' mindsets before they reached the referendum question. Fortunately, we already know that the introductory question has been removed from tonight's poll, so in that sense there's no reason to question the results. However, when the datasets arrive it'll certainly be worth checking whether ICM have once again significantly under-represented men and Scottish-born respondents, and over-represented English-born respondents. If they have, that in itself might be sufficient to explain the remaining small difference between the 45% Yes vote they are reporting, and the 48% Yes vote reported by Panelbase.

Where are we left now in terms of the overall state of play? As always (and this will presumably continue to be the case all the way up to polling day), there is huge uncertainty on what the true numbers on the ground are - the estimates of the Yes vote range from 40% to 48%. It's not even the case that there is a broad consensus being contradicted by one or two outliers - the six polling firms are in fact spaced out reasonably evenly along that range. Because so many polls are reliant on volunteer online panels, it's particularly important to pay attention to the two firms who actually go and seek people out in the 'real world' - and although it's true that both Ipsos-Mori and TNS-BMRB are broadly on the No-friendly end of the spectrum, there's actually an important contradiction between the two. Ipsos-Mori report a Yes vote of 40% regardless of whether a turnout filter is applied, but by complete contrast the turnout filter makes a huge difference to the TNS results. Among those certain to vote, Yes is at 44%, and if you add in 'undecided leaners' the figure is 45% - exactly the same as ICM are reporting tonight.

And as we all know in life, where you are right now is a hell of a lot less important than where you're going. Incredibly, it's now the case that five out of six BPC-affiliated pollsters have shown a decrease in the No lead in their most recent poll - the only exception is TNS-BMRB who showed a static position. Four out of the six firms have shown the No lead at its outright lowest point of the campaign so far in their most recent poll, while a fifth (TNS-BMRB again) showed it at its joint lowest point. Well, we know McDougall's minions can be very creative in serving the forces of darkness, but I think even they'd struggle to reconcile those trends with a repeat of the notorious "Momentum Is With No" graphic!

* * *

I've just caught up with John Curtice's analysis of tonight's polls, and although it's very fair and detailed, I find it most interesting for what it doesn't say than for what it does. You can be 99.99% certain that Curtice will already have seen the full datasets for the Yes Scotland-commissioned Panelbase poll, which means that if there had been any funny business with leading wording or with the question sequence he would have mentioned it. No objection is raised at all, meaning that we can regard the 48% figure as robust - Yes really have reached their highest level of support of the campaign so far with Panelbase.

Curtice also reveals that the headline Panelbase figures (ie. not excluding Don't Knows) are -

Yes 43% (+3)
No 46% (-1)

What's striking about that is just how high the raw Yes vote is - it's 2% higher than in any previous Panelbase poll that didn't use an unusual question sequence.

* * *

NO LEAD SLUMPS TO ALL-TIME LOW IN SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS The last update of the Poll of Polls showed the No lead returning to a position very close to the previous all-time low, so it was always inevitable that two polls showing substantial swings to Yes tonight were going to see a new record being set by a good distance. As it turns out, the swings are just about big enough to take the lead below the psychological 10% threshold on the average that takes account of Don't Knows. As recently as September of last year, the No campaign had an advantage of 21.6% - more than half of that has now been wiped out.

MEAN AVERAGE (excluding Don't Knows) :

Yes 44.1% (+0.9)
No 55.9% (-0.9)

MEAN AVERAGE (not excluding Don't Knows) :

Yes 36.8% (+0.8)
No 46.7% (-0.6)

MEDIAN AVERAGE (excluding Don't Knows) :

Yes 43.8% (+1.5)
No 56.2% (-1.5)

(The Poll of Polls is based on a rolling average of the most recent poll from each of the pollsters that have been active in the referendum campaign since September 2013, and that adhere to British Polling Council rules. At present, there are six - YouGov, TNS-BMRB, Survation, Panelbase, Ipsos-Mori and ICM. Whenever a new poll is published, it replaces the last poll from the same company in the sample. Changes in the Poll of Polls are generally glacial in nature due to the fact that only a small portion of the sample is updated each time.) In case you're wondering, ICM are solely responsible for the bigger shift in the median average, which is currently calculated as the mid-point between ICM and YouGov.

Here are the long-term trend figures, with the updates prior to Easter recalculated to exclude the inactive pollster Angus Reid...